Moving right along!

I started cell collections first thing Tuesday morning, and guess what?  I'm already done!  It only took me 2 days to collect all the cells needed, and then some.  The grand total for Tuesday and Wednesday came to 6.8 million cells collected - the goal number to reach was 5 million.  Tuesday alone I collected 4.25 million, and the doctors were quite impressed.   They kept telling me not to be surprised if it takes a little longer with how much chemo I've previously had, but apparently that didn't matter so much in my case!  I can thank both the growth factor shots and Mozobil for helping to speed up the process.  I was just told yesterday that the Mozobil shots are $14,000 a pop, and each growth factor shot I get is $1,500.  Isn't that outrageous?  I've received 17 shots of growth factor and 2 shots of the Mozobil. I'll let you do the math, but all I can say is I'm blessed to have such good health insurance. 

Naturally, we had a few "hiccups" on Tuesday morning when they were trying to get started because that's just how I roll.  As the nurse was trying to draw blood from both of the lines to use for labs, neither of them were working very well.  I guess sometimes the placement of the line can cause the issue or how I'm positioned so she had me turning my head from right to left, tried sitting me up, having me lay down, and even had me put my arms above my head to see if it'd help.  Nothing really seemed to work to get the blood return she was looking for, and I was starting to get nervous.  As it turns out I had some blood clotting that was building up in the lines causing all the issues so they went ahead and ordered a medication to break those clots up.  Unfortunately the medication needed to sit in the lines for a good half hour before they could try again which delayed the process of getting started.  In the end it was worth the wait.  The line that they needed to use to take the cells worked great from that point on even though the other one is still being stubborn.  Thankfully there were no issues pushing stuff through this line being that its primary purpose is to put the blood back into my body vs. pushing it out.  Nobody seems too concerned about the line not doing both, so if they're not worried, I'm not worried.

I took a bunch of pictures from the 2 days of collections that I thought I'd share with you all...
Here is the machine that the blood flows through.  Looks complicated, doesn't it??

The machine in action.  

The clear bag is Sodium Chloride, the bag in the middle holds the red blood cells, 

and the bag on the right holds plasma

Close up of my central line in action...

The red one pushes the blood out while the blue one gives the blood back

Mom & I on day 2

 

The final product for day 2 - Turns out there are 2.55 million stem cells in this bag!

Since I've reached the stem cell collection goal, the physician I saw today told me that I could expect a call sometime this afternoon letting me know what the bed situation looked like on the BMT floor and when I may be able to be admitted for my week's worth of chemo.  Sure enough I received a call around 1:45 this afternoon letting me know that a bed is all ready for me tomorrow morning already so I'll be checking in at 10 AM, and will be there for the next 5 days or so to get chemo and to have these healthy stem cells put back into my body.  

Please pray for patience for Josh and I as we get through the next several days in the hospital.  Between the lack of sleep due to constant interruptions for vitals, and finding out how I handle this new form of chemo, things could get interesting!